Redefining Form. Objects for the Body

From October 18th, 2019 to February 23rd, 2020

 

Rei Kawakubo (b. 1942 in Japan) is a designer whose work has been described as “anti-fashion.” Her avant-garde designs persistently question, or even mock, accepted ideas about beauty, the body and reductive notions of gender.

Gathered under the umbrella of the Comme des Garçons concept (‘Like Boys,’ in French) are other Japanese designers such as Junya Watanabe and Kei Ninomiya. Kawakubo’s leadership has helped to create a “Japanese school” over the past fifty years, which has had a striking influence on fashion and contemporary art the world over. Her designs employ protuberances and other singular forms to express new ideas about beauty, but also about the world in general. She offers a daring feminist reappraisal of the body, undermining conventional stereotypes of femininity and expanding the notion of freedom itself into more abstract domains.

Part of this expansion is her creation of “non-clothing,” consisting of objects designed for the body, made sometimes of fabric, knotted together without seams, but also of cardboard, plastics, and various industrial materials.

Considered a visionary radical and a feminist hero, a designer who has reinvented the color black and freed haute couture from the coils of vanity, Kawakubo once described her creations as similar to Zen koans. Koans are apparently insoluble problems, often formulated in the form of stories, dialogues, or questions, posed by Buddhist teachers in order to demonstrate the limits of reason and intellect, and thereby to free the minds of their pupils.

In interviews, Kawakubo has pointed out that, when things are too easy, people fail to think and so to progress. The only way to make something new is never to be satisfied. “There are no limits,” she says. The creative process takes place mainly through words and the imagination.

 

“There’s no reference point. If anything I avoid any reference points. I feel I can succeed more in making something that hasn’t existed before if I don’t look for reference points.”

 

This is the first exhibition in Mexico of work by an artist who, since 1969, has been exploding conventions and breaking down the barriers between art, design, and fashion, through Comme des Garçons.

For the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, as a contemporary art museum, it is important to work along various lines of contemporary culture that tend toward creative innovation and the autonomy of ideas. We aspire to expand the limits of our space so as to include new ways of thinking that foster inclusiveness and empathy for diversity.

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Floating Station | Taka Fernández

From march 24th to may 12th, 2019

 

One of the principal axes of the work of Taka Fernández has been the exploration of landscape: not only as a formal representation of space or a simple quest for a given contextual framework, but rather landscape viewed as a receptacle of passing time, of activities both human and ecological, as an active protagonist of history.

In 2013 Fernández presented the exhibition Capítulo 20, el enjambre y el eco nebuloso (Chapter 20: The Swarm and the Nebulous Echo), in which, alongside a series of large-format paintings of mangrove swamps, he included a sculptural artifact: a wooden tower mounted on a platform of plastic panels. Built as a prototype, it was conceived to serve as a place of observation and contemplation, as well as mobile drawing and painting workshop, which would function as both witness to and catalyst of the social and ecological processes of the areas it visited.

The prototype of the station was very heavy, so in 2015, the Floating Station of Active Contemplation (F.S.A.C.) was redesigned so that it would float on water. On two occasions it was taken to the mangrove swamps of the Manialtepec lagoon in Oaxaca. On the first occasion it remained there for fifteen days and on the second for a month and a half. On a third occasion in the same year the station was installed on the Allende reservoir near San Miguel de Allende for a week.

The function of the station is drawn from the Taoist concept of contemplation as formulated in the I Ching, where it is imaged as a tower articulated as an observatory. The function of the device can be viewed from two perspectives: on the one hand, as a platform that offers a broad view of its surroundings; on the other, as something that can be observed from its surroundings.

A sculpture that consists of a recurring symbol in the artist’s work has emerged as an appendix to the F.S.A.C. Based the process of expansion and contraction of the universe, this sculpture embodies the pairs of dual forces that complement each other: receptor/emitter, time/space. The olin, represented by the butterfly in the Nahua iconography, is the symbol of the movement of these forces.

 

 

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Modulations: The Art of Painting, 1898-2016

From April 27th, 2017, through September 30th, 2018

 

Throughout history, painting has been one of the axes that give form and meaning to discourse about art and processes of esthetic reformulation. On this premise, the exhibition Modulaciones surveys for the first time the Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection in terms of its pictorial content. The selection of works seeks, on the one hand, to emphasize the dynamic quality of painting, proposing dialogues between works of different periods and contexts, and on the other, to register the collection’s range of formal transformations and intersections, cutting across generational, geographical, and personal lines, in order to suggest new perspectives of analysis and examination of the specific medium of painting.

 

There is an oscillating temporal movement to be found in each room. The name of the exhibition alludes to the modulations generated within painting in the course of its history, marked by debate on different approaches to the art. In certain periods, figuration and representation have been favored, whereas in others, various forms of abstraction or even conceptual practices have held sway. In spite of these variations, there are interests, genres, and languages that have remained constant.

 

It is precisely to these constant elements that the exhibition owes its organization into thematic nuclei: Portraiture and Figure Painting, Landscape, Spatial Dislocations, Scenes and Settings, Integration of the Object, Monochromy and Language, Painting and Matter. The first nuclei deal with the evolution and expansion of traditional genres within the practice of painting, while the rest examine different areas or lines of exploration and experimentation: the progressive development of spatial conceptions, strategies aimed at overcoming the limits of two dimensions, the integration of foreign objects and materials, and explorations into color. The selection moves from the intimacy of small formats to larger-scale works that involve a different type of interaction on the part of the viewer.

 

The narrative of the exhibition has not been conceived as a chronological sequence or a succession of artistic movements. The aim is rather to generate constellations of works that place iconic modern pieces alongside each other, engaged in a dialogue with the languages and approaches of the present-day practice of the art of painting.

 

Viewers of the exhibition are invited to consider painting from a contemporary standpoint on the basis of two axiomatic circumstances: first, that painting is not simply an autonomous act, but at the same time a reflection on and attitude toward painting itself; and second, that the practice of painting can now be conceived as an articulation of other formal means and possibilities in approaching an artistic project. All of this is part of the constant reinvention of painting and its ongoing vitality within the broader discourse about art.

 

Artists: Adolfo Best Maugard, Albert Oehlen, Alberto Gironella, Alex Hubbard, Alfonso Michel, Alfredo Zalce, Beatriz Milhazes, Brady Dollarhide, Carlos Amorales, Cisco JimÈnez, Cordelia Urueta, Cynthia Gutiérrez, Dan Colen, Daniel Guzman, David Ellis, David Salle, Doze Green, Ed Ruscha, Enrique Guzmán, Ettore Spalletti, Francis Alÿs, Francis Lisa Ruyter, Francisco Toledo, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, Gabriel Orozco, German Venegas, Guillermo Kuitca, Gunther Forg, Gunther Gerzso, Helio Oiticica, Ignasi Aballi, Jason Martin, Jesús Guerrero Galván, Jesús Rafael Soto, Julian Opie, Joe Bradley, John Baldessari, José Clemente Orozco, Joy Laville, Julio Castellanos, Julio Galan, Julio Ruelas, Liat Yossifor, Lilia Carrillo, Lucio Fontana, Manuel González Serrano, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Mario García-Torres, Mark Manders, Matt Ager, Moris, Nahum Zenil, Ned Vena, Neo Rauch. Os Gemeos, R.H. Quaytman, Richard Long, Robert Rauschenberg, Roberto Montenegro, Santiago Sierra, Sarah Morris, Saturnino Herrrán, Shepard Fairey, Sigmar Polke, Tam Van Tran, Tauba Auerbach, Theaster Gates, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Vivian Suter, Wilhelm Sasnal, Zhou LI.

 

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Redefinir la forma. Objetos para el cuerpo

Del 18 de octubre de 2019 al 22 de marzo de 2020

 

Rei Kawakubo (Japón 1942) es una diseñadora cuyas prendas han sido definidas como antimoda. Sus diseños de vanguardia una y otra vez cuestionan, incluso ridiculizan, las convenciones acerca de la belleza, el cuerpo y las nociones reductivas sobre género.

Con el concepto Comme des Garçons (como los muchachos), cobija a otros diseñadores japoneses como Junya Watanabe y Kei Ninomiya. Su liderazgo ha generado una escuela japonesa que durante los últimos 50 años ha repercutido de una manera contundente en la moda y el arte en el mundo. Sus diseños se valen de protuberancias y otras formas singulares para proponer nuevas ideas sobre la belleza, pero también sobre las cosas del mundo. Ofrece una atrevida reconsideración sobre el cuerpo, trasgrede los estereotipos acerca de lo femenino y al hacerlo expande la noción de libertad hacia ámbitos más abstractos.

Es en esta expansión es donde crea «no ropa», produce objetos para el cuerpo a veces con tela, con nudos sin costuras, pero también con cartón, plásticos y variados materiales industriales.

Considerada una visionaria radical y una heroína feminista, que reinventó el color negro y liberó la alta moda de la vanidad, alguna vez describió su trabajo parecido a los koan zen. Se dice que los koan son problemas sin solución aparente impuestos por los maestros budistas que tienen la intención, al no poderse resolver, de mostrar los límites del intelecto y la razón, para liberar a la mente.

 

En diferentes entrevistas Kawakubo ha dicho que cuando las cosas son demasiado fáciles, uno no piensa y entonces uno no progresa. La única manera de poder hacer algo nuevo es nunca estar satisfecho. No hay límites, dice. El proceso de creatividad se hace mayormente mediante palabras e imaginación.

 

«No hay puntos de referencia, trato de evitar las referencias. Siento que podré hacer algo nuevo, que nadie nunca haya visto, si no busco puntos de referencia».

 

Por primera vez en México se presenta una muestra de piezas de una artista que desde 1969 ha reventado convencionalismos y diluido las barreras entre el arte, el diseño y la moda a través de Comme des Garçons.

Para el MAZ, como museo de arte contemporáneo, es importante poder trabajar con diversas líneas de la cultura contemporánea tendientes a la innovación creativa y a la generación de pensamiento autónomo. Aspiramos a expandir el espacio para posibilitar nuevas formas de pensar que amplíen la inclusión y la empatía hacia la diversidad.

 

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Biombo: Linotype | Ana Paula Santana

From march 26th to july 14th, 2019

Linotipia (Linotype) is a research and reflection project focusing on the linotype machine and its operators. The project has two parameters: finding printing establishments in Guadalajara that still have functioning equipment of this kind, and interviewing the linotype operators.

The modern printing press based on movable type was invented in the West by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. Movable type consists of individual specimens of letters or symbols in inverted relief, which can be combined to form words and so generate a page to be used for printing. Movable type has two disadvantages: first, it is a laborious task to set the text, letter by letter; and second, the metal of the type gradually wears down over time, limiting its usefulness.

The linotype machine eventually replaced the use of movable type in the industry, becoming the dominant method of mass printing through the first half of the twentieth century. The linotype machine operator uses a 90-character keyboard (lower case, upper case, punctuation signs, and numbers) to assemble matrices, or molds for the letter forms, which are cast as a single piece, consisting of an entire line of type. The matrices are then rearranged by means of a mechanical distribution system.

The imminent disappearance of linotype printing has been a result of technological progress and the more efficient offset printing process. Moreover, the lack of apprentices in the trade is leaving the equipment without skilled operators. It should be noted that the components of the casting material ―lead, tin, antimony, and zinc― are toxic to operators. There are only four linotype operators currently working in Guadalajara: Salvador Botello, Emilio Hernández, Francisco Lozano, and Rafael Villegas.

Based on her research, artist Ana Paula Santana published the book Linotipia, which contains some of the material she gathered: photographs, maps, and interviews with the linotype operators. Santana has also produced several sound pieces, recording and reordering the noise of the equipment when it is in operation. Some of these sound pieces are presented as part of the exhibition.

 

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Un arte sin tutela: Salón Independiente en México 1968-1971

Del 31 de mayo al 20 de octubre de 2019

 

 

Un arte sin tutela: Salón Independiente en México 1968-1971 es la primera reconstrucción de las exposiciones que organizó el Salón Independiente (SI) de 1968 a 1971, uno de los principales momentos de quiebre entre los artistas avanzados y el aparato cultural mexicano. De hecho, al estudiar la génesis del SI ésta también es la primera revisión del clima de la producción artística  del año donde coinciden en México los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada, el movimiento estudiantil y la violencia del Estado.

Precisamente por emerger de un momento de crisis, el SI agrupó un conjunto de posiciones estéticas y políticas heterogéneas. Si bien la primera causa del Salón fue la defensa de la más estricta libertad creativa individual, progresivamente la agrupación articuló posiciones colaborativas, el juego con materiales inusuales, y la producción de ambientaciones y obras efímeras, especialmente en el Tercer Salón de 1970 donde la falta de recursos invitó a los artistas a trabajar con cartón y papel periódico.  El SI fue también el escenario del choque generacional entre la práctica individual de taller y la ambición de producir un arte colectivo y politizado de la década de los años 70.

Volver los ojos a reconstruir en detalle las actividades del SI no sólo completa un capítulo pendiente de la historia del arte, sino que permite pensar la potencia y diversas encarnaciones que puede tomar la noción de autonomía.

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Art Without Guardianship: Salón Independiente in Mexico 1968-1971

Art Without Guardianship: Salón Independiente in Mexico 1968-1971 is the first reconstruction of the exhibitions organized by the Salón Independiente (SI) from 1968 to 1971—one of the key breaking points between the avant-garde and the Mexican cultural establishment. By studying the birth of the SI, this exhibition also reviews the art scene during the momentous year when the Olympic Games, the student movement and State violence came to a head.

Its emergence at a critical moment brought together wildly heterogeneous aesthetic and political views. At first, the SI’s most important cause was complete individual creative freedom, but the group would later adopt views favorable to collaboration, experimentation with unusual materials, and the creation of “environments” and ephemeral works. For their third exhibition in 1970, which had a very restricted budget, the artists worked entirely in cardboard and newsprint. The SI was also a stage for the generational clash between individual workshop art and the collective, politicized art production that would define the 1970s in Mexico.

With this act of looking back to the SI and its affairs, an open chapter in art history is brought to a close as we are left to ponder new questions on the potential of autonomy and its diversity of possible manifestations.

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Skill and Material | Napoleón Aguilera, Karian Amaya, Lorena Ancona, ektor garcia, Rodrigo González Castellanos, Carmen Huizar, Felipe Manzano, Nuria Montiel

From August 31st, 2018 to January 16th, 2019

 

Oficio y materia (Skill and Material) is a small sampling on the contemporary art scene of an interest in —and of the pertinence of— traditional craft techniques, folk practices, regional materials, and ancestral skills associated with rural milieus.

 

This attention given (supposedly only recently) to artisanal techniques in the handling of textiles, ceramics, and natural pigments and to various practices originating among country people can be understood in various ways. The artists assembled in this exhibition come from different environments, with a range of motivations that have in one way or another determined their work: the raising of pigs and sheep in the region of Los Altos in Jalisco; the codes of male power reflected in the intricacy of the embroidered belts made in Colotlán; the settled fate of generations of women weavers, transmuted by a male artist whose skill with the crochet hook is a central element of his work. The participants are young artists who celebrate the dexterity and painstaking effort of manual work, who acknowledge the vitality of local materials and the importance of natural cycles, who honor the influence of Mexico’s indigenous peoples and the treasures of folk wisdom.

 

Some of the artists draw directly on manual techniques, reinterpreting traditional designs, codes, and meanings. Some reformulate the techniques themselves through the use of new supports and unexpected elements, highlighting the perpetuation of gender stereotypes and representations of power. Still other experiment with local materials, injecting new value by transforming raw materials into finished products.

 

The division that produced the modern notion of the “fine arts” and the fetishization of certain specific techniques and genres (such as easel painting, generally executed in oils, as it developed in the seventeenth century), considered noble and intellectual, in contrast to “craft genres,” brought with it a hierarchy of values and a redistribution of visibility and signification. This dichotomy between art and craft, also reflected in terms of class, rank, sex, and cultural or ethnic origin, implies not only a distinction between the artist and the artisan, but also the development of a non-ordinary esthetic pleasure to be taken in objects of “static attention.”

 

These hierarchies are upended by the insertion of artisanal practices and techniques into the hegemonic ambit of contemporary art, as both the scope and functions of art are expanded. Nevertheless, there is still a need to challenge both artists and museums as the sole agents, spaces of visibility, and arbiters of the cultural legitimacy of these expressions.

 

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Library of the Earth | Marianna Dellekamp

From august 31st through october 12th, 2019

 

The Biblioteca de la Tierra (Library of the Earth) is the biggest library in the world. It contains only 450 volumes, but it is not the number of books that makes it the largest library that could potentially exist, but the fact that it is the material representation of the elements that constitute the Earth itself. Serving as a container of the Earth (and of its earth), of its geographies, of its coastlines, forests, jungles, and mountains, but also of the sum of its inhabitants (past, present, and future), it has the potential of containing all the stories, both true and false, that have ever been told, and that will continue to be told until the end of days. Every story: every amorous encounter, the happiness of every birth, the tragedy of every misfortune, the pain of every sickness, and the final liberation of death.

 

Dellekamp’s library belongs to the world  of the Aleph in the story by Borges, or of that encyclopedia volume devoted to a country that never existed, which provided an account of its climate, its rivers and fields, its woodlands –whether pine forests or tropical jungles–, the number of its inhabitants and the very last child born in it.

 

It is the dwellers on this common planet who make up, as its various authors, the variety and richness of the Library. From 2008 to the present, the artist has been receiving contributions from others wishing also to participate, in the hope perhaps of making our existence a little less banal. Let a record remain of the fact that we were inhabitants of the third planet in the solar system, located in the arm of Orion, one of the spiraling coils of the Milky Way. Let it be known that we once bathed in its waters and were warmed by its sunlight.

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Restoration of a Mural | Tercerunquinto

From July 20th to November 9th, 2019

 

Restauración de una pintura mural (Restoration of a Mural) is a work consisting of a series of exercises in documentary filmmaking, an extension of the project of the same name begun by Tercerunquinto in 2010. The film tells the story of a team of art restoration and conservation professionals who restore a campaign slogan painted on a wall in favor of the candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) for the 2000 presidential election, the first election of its kind lost by the party in seventy-one years. The mural painting was located on the exterior wall of a private home in San Andrés Cacaloapan, a village in the municipality of Tepanco de López in the state of Puebla, Mexico. The film records real events, in rigorously conventional documentary form, but it also explores other situations purposely provoked by the members of Tercerunquinto. Around the guiding axis of the story of the work of some restorers of a political campaign mural in a small community in Puebla, the artists have undertaken a series of exercises in different cinematographic languages, both examining and complicating the classical notions of fiction and reality. The film was recorded on video, with a handheld camera, by a team limited to the two members of Tercerunquinto.

 

The film is complemented by three additional elements:

A set of visual materials (storyboard, visual essays, and a selection of archival material) generated by the process of working on the film.

A panel discussion with the members of Tercerunquinto, joined by ethnologist Sergio Raúl Arroyo and curator Mónica Ashida, held in the Museo de Arte de Zapopan on Saturday, June 1st, 2019.

A brochure containing an essay by Sergio Raúl Arroyo.

 

Projection of the film:
Wednesdays | 16:00 h
Restauración de una pintura mural (Restoration of a Mural)
Directors: Tercerunquinto
Country: Mexico
53 mins | 2009-2017

 

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Restauración de una pintura mural | Tercerunquinto

Del 21 de julio al 9 de noviembre

 

Restauración de una pintura mural es una película que consiste de una serie de ejercicios alrededor de lo documental en el arte, que se suman al del registro de la obra del mismo nombre que Tercerunquinto produjo en el año 2010. Ésta consistió en que un equipo de profesionales en restauración y conservación de bienes artísticos restaurara una antigua pinta de campaña política del candidato presidencial del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) en las elecciones del año 2000, cuando pierde unas de este tipo por primera vez, después de setenta y un años. La pinta estaba localizada en el exterior de uno de los muros de una casa particular ubicada en San Andrés Cacaloapan, poblado perteneciente al municipio de Tepanco de López, en el estado de Puebla, México. La película registra en ocasiones, en el sentido convencional o riguroso de una idea de lo documental, eventos dados en la realidad, aunque en otras también analiza diferentes situaciones provocadas, e incluso premeditadamente creadas por Tercerunquinto. A partir del eje rector del trabajo de los restauradores de la pinta política en la pequeña comunidad en Puebla, los artistas emprendieron una serie de trabajos por medio de algunos lenguajes cinematográficos que atraviesan y complejizan las nociones clásicas de ficción y realidad. La película fue grabada en video, con una cámara en mano, y sin más equipo humano de trabajo que los propios artistas de Tercerunquinto.

 

La película contempla tres elementos adicionales:

 

Un conjunto de materiales gráficos (mezcla de storyboard, ensayos gráficos y una selección de archivo documental) que resultaron del proceso de trabajo de la película. 

 

Un panel que incluyó a los integrantes de Tercerunquinto, al etnólogo Sergio Raúl Arroyo y a la curadora Mónica Ashida, que se llevó a cabo en el museo el día sábado 1 de junio de 2019.

 

Un brochure que incluye un ensayo escrito por Sergio Raúl Arroyo.  

Proyección de la película:
Todos los miércoles | 16 h
Restauración de una pintura mural
Dirección: Tercerunquinto
País: México
53 min |  2009-2017

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Linotipia | Ana Paula Santana

Del 26 de marzo al 14 de julio de 2019

 

 

Linotipia es un proyecto de documentación y reflexión sobre la máquina del linotipo y sus operadores. El proyecto parte de dos parámetros: identificar las imprentas de Guadalajara que aún tienen máquinas en funcionamiento y entrevistar a los linotipistas.

 

La imprenta moderna fue inventada en Occidente por Johannes Gutenberg en 1440, basada en tipos móviles. Los tipos móviles son piezas individuales de caracteres o símbolos en relieve invertidos (letras), los cuales se agrupan para componer palabras y así generar una página que se utiliza para impresión. El tipo móvil tiene dos inconvenientes: lo laborioso del  ordenamiento del texto a imprimir letra por letra y el desgaste físico del mismo que limita su utilidad.

 

Dentro de la industria editorial el tipo móvil fue desplazado por el linotipo. El linotipo es una máquina de fundición de líneas para impresión, que durante la primera mitad del siglo XX dominó la industria editorial masiva. El linotipo cuenta con un teclado de 90 caracteres (letras minúsculas, mayúsculas, signos de puntuación y números). Las matrices, moldes de los caracteres, se ensamblan en líneas para ser fundidas y obtener la línea con la cual se imprime el texto. Las matrices se reacomodan por medio de un sistema mecánico de distribución.

 

La inminente desaparición del linotipo se debe al avance tecnológico hacia una impresión más eficiente en offset. Además, la falta de aprendices para el oficio está dejando a las máquinas sin linotipistas. Por otro lado, los componentes del fundido de las líneas como plomo, estaño, antimonio y zinc son tóxicos para el operador. Actualmente en Guadalajara sólo hay cuatro operadores de linotipo, Salvador Botello, Emilio Hernández, Francisco Lozano y Rafael Villegas.

 

Como resultado de esta investigación, la artista Ana Paula Santana editó el libro Linotipia, con el material recopilado: fotografías, mapas y entrevistas a los linotipistas. También ha desarrollado varias composiciones sonoras en las cuales registra y sugiere un ordenamiento del ruido de las máquinas en producción. En la exposición se presentan algunos de estos testimonios sonoros.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute

Curators: Elka Krajewska y Mark Wasiuta
Exhibition design: Adam Bandler, Elka Krajewska
and Mark Wasiuta
From November 30th, 2018, through March 24th, 2019

 

Drawn from the art insurance lexicon, the term “salvage art” refers to works removed from art circulation due to accidental damage. Salvage pieces are subject to a peculiar and transformative actuarial logic. Once “total loss” status has been declared and indemnification has been paid, salvage art is considered officially devoid of value. Its objects are cast into art’s nether world, no longer alive for the market, gallery or museum system, but often still relatively intact. Salvage art is liberated from the burden of constant valuation and the obligation of exchange, yet abandoned to the invisibility of perpetual storage.

 

Founded by Elka Krajewska, the Salvage Art Institute (SAI) supplies a refuge for salvaged art pieces. The survival of salvage art even past its total devaluation confronts our common understanding of where art ends, disturbing the distinction, organization, and separation of art from non-art. The Salvage Art Institute offers a platform for exposing, viewing and encountering the condition of salvage art and provides a forum for engaging the regulation of its financial, aesthetic and social value.

 

In spring 2012 The Salvage Art Institute accepted a gift of its first salvage art inventory, which comprises the core of the exhibition. The salvaged works in No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute are identified by their SAI acquisition numbers. A numerical index relates each piece to its insurance claim, and to the process of evaluation and judgment through which it has been made salvage and transmuted into “no longer art.” Where available documentation describing the damage and the steps toward total loss designation is displayed.

 

The Salvage Art Institute’s mandate is to maintain the separation of value from its no longer art inventory. No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute, the first public appearance of the SAI, follows this objective, simultaneously opening the inventory to scrutiny while attempting to momentarily suspend the force of attraction between its objects and value.

 

Conceived by Elka Krajewska and Mark Wasiuta andproduced by GSAPP exhibitions (Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation) and SAI (Salvage Art Institute), the exhibition No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institutewas first shown at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in New York in 2012.

 

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Estación Flotante | Taka Fernández

Del 24 de marzo al 12 de mayo de 2019

 

Uno de los ejes fundamentales del trabajo de Taka Fernández ha sido la exploración del paisaje. No sólo como una representación formal del espacio o la búsqueda de un mero marco contextual determinado, sino el paisaje aspectado como receptáculo del paso del tiempo, tanto de la actividad ecológica como de la humana, asimilando al paisaje como un protagonista activo de la historia.

 

En el año 2013, realizó la exposición Capítulo 20, el enjambre y el eco nebuloso, en la que a la par de una serie de pinturas de gran formato con el tema de los manglares, incluyó un artefacto escultórico: una torre de madera montada sobre una plataforma de paneles de plástico. Construida como un prototipo, se ideó con el objetivo de servir como un lugar de observación y contemplación, así como de taller nómada de dibujo y pintura, para al mismo tiempo funcionar como testigo y catalizador de los procesos sociales y ecológicos de las zonas visitadas.

 

El prototipo de la estación era muy pesado, por lo que en el 2015 la Estación Flotante de Contemplación Activa (E.F.C.A.) fue rediseñada para poder flotar sobre el agua. En dos ocasiones fue llevada a los manglares de la laguna de Manialtepec, Oaxaca. La primera estancia fue de 15 días y la segunda de mes y medio. Por tercera vez en el año la estación se emplazó a la presa Allende, San Miguel Allende, con una estancia de una semana.

 

Su funcionamiento se desprende del concepto taoísta formulado en el I Ching sobre la contemplación, que tiene como imagen una torre articulada como observatorio. Este dispositivo funciona con dos perspectivas, por un lado es una plataforma desde la cual se tiene una visión amplia del entorno y por otro lado destaca del entorno permitiendo a su vez ser observado.

 

Como apéndice de la E.F.C.A se desprende una escultura/símbolo recurrente en el trabajo del artista. Basado en los procesos de expansión y de contracción del universo,  la escultura materializa las fuerzas duales que se complementan tales como receptor y emisor, tiempo y espacio. El olin es el símbolo del movimiento de esas fuerzas, es representado por la mariposa en la iconografía náhuatl.

 

 

 

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All Stories Come Together in the End

All Stories Come Together in the End

Artista: Carlos Ranc

This exhibition originated in The Clipperton Project, a trip to the island of Clipperton in March 2012. The journey was made in two small sailboats and a motorboat, with a total of twenty-two participants, including the crew. The passengers included artists, writers, and scientists, whose mission was to develop scientific and artistic research and production projects during and after the trip. As a result of this experience, which was not unaffected by various problems, Carlos Ranc created a body of work divided into thematic groups. For Biombo*, Ranc presents some of the works that make up this extensive project:

A small library of books in Spanish, English, and French about shipwrecks, losses, islands (both real and metaphorical), maritime tragedies, etc., whose titles and authors’ names were effaced, so that the members of the “crew” could not know whom or what they were reading during the trip. The covers of the books were covered in a phosphorescent orange such as that used for life jackets and inflatable lifeboats.

A video in which the artist is depicted as the curator of an exhibition held on the island of objects gather in situ, out of which Ranc, in an act of appropriation, recreated works by other artists. The text that appears in the subtitles is from the novel Clipperton by Pablo Raphael, a close friend of the artist and also a member of the crew. Before embarking on the voyage, Ranc sent an invitation to everyone on his list of contacts to announce the exhibition: Marooned, “…so so far away that no one can visit it,” with the geographical coordinates of the island as the sole reference.

A book of songs, in the form of a playlist, edited together in such a way that they tell a story of a love affair drawing to its end. There are only two copies of the book: one was deliberately left on the island as a token of expiation, while the other is the one exhibited here.

The work Get Your Filthy Hands off My Desert was created a few months after returning from the island. The monuments in question are all milestones of defeat. The artist transfers them symbolically to the island, which has been reclaimed and then lost again, where the real victors are scurvy and madness.

* Biombo is a program of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan aimed at expanding the practice of art through the appropriation of writing and publishing techniques, through works which are not limited to book form, but which have to be read in order to be understood.

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Estudio abierto #6: 673.85 kg | Zazil Barba, Alberto López Corcuera y Álvaro Ugarte

From August 13th to November 15th, 2015

 

Apendix EA6: Atelier Van Lieshout, Kimberlee Córdova, El empleado del mes, Fran Ilich, Joshua Jobb, Gabriel Kuri, Augusto Marban, Federico Martínez Montoya, Cristina Ochoa y Guillermo Santamarina LA FAVORITA Colectivo—formed by of Zazil Barba, Alberto López Corcuera and Álvaro Ugarte—has developed a consistent portfolio of participatory art as a means of approaching the study of human nature. Influenced by social science methodologies and scientific experimentation, the collective has generated solutions that involve spectators in decision-making processes. The project commissioned for the present exhibition features a surface layer of sand, on the gallery floor, that covers an indefinite number of Mexican coins with a ten-centavo face value.

 

Visitors are invited to move across the installation as well as explore and interact with it, in accordance with their personal boundaries. The show title, 473.85 kg, refers to the overall weight of the metal used to mint the centavo coins buried in the sand. The coins’ face value is determined by social convention—a covenant accepted among their users—in contrast to their “real” value, which in this case is a function of how much metal was used to mint the coins, the energy and resources used for their manufacture and, not least of all, the labor of those gallery visitors who decide to exchange their time and efforts for money. The LA FAVORITA Colectivo proposal is inscribed within a line of work that links art to the economy. Within so-called imaginary economics—a term Olav Velthius used to speak of contemporary art’s interpretations of economic phenomena—play is posited as a means of proposing viewpoints that, while they may not always be critical or affirmative of economic processes, do take on making them explicit. Artists who participate in imaginary economics extract spectators from their customary ways of thinking and acting. By parodying and imitating economic processes, they ridicule the modern myths amid which the economy is driven. Specifically, they decontextualize such myths to reveal their absurdity.

 

Imaginary economics do not obey market laws and can be modeled in accordance with irrational desires and requirements. Yet they still give rise to fundamental themes that lead to enhanced understanding of economic processes, as audiences are invited to question both the economy’s general predominance in our lives and our obsession with accumulating wealth.

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Otro día… (Poemas sintéticos) | Verónica Gerber Bicecci

Del 30 de noviembre de 2018 al 10 de marzo de 2019

 

En 1919 José Juan Tablada publicó Un día… (poemas sintéticos) , una alabanza a la naturaleza compuesta de haikus y estampas circulares diseñadas por él mismo. La artista y escritora, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, decidió  reescribir sus poemas para imaginar un día distinto, casi un siglo después, en el que más que una oda, lo urgente es reflexionar sobre la inminencia de una catástrofe ecológica. También sustituyó sus dibujos por las fotografías que se mandaron al espacio en el Disco de oro en 1977 (una de las pocas pruebas de la vida en la Tierra que sobrevivirá cuando hayamos desaparecido). Estas imágenes están intervenidas con acetona para emular los trazos originales de Tablada y, al mismo tiempo, emborronar la memoria que contienen.

 

Un siglo después significa muchas cosas. Cuatro generaciones distintas, una Revolución que se institucionaliza, una segunda guerra mundial, la repartición de países y pueblos, las vanguardias, viajes a la luna, liberación femenina y sexual, opresión femenina y sexual, tecnología como forma de vida, cambio climático, desastre ecológico, fronteras militarizadas, migraciones detenidas en un limbo, declive de las democracias.

 

La reescritura y las ilustraciones de Gerber Bicecci, a través de una poderosa sutileza, nos sitúan sin remedio en el presente, en el momento en el que la existencia se quiebra y la imposibilidad de completar otro siglo más es el futuro catastrófico. No habrá nadie a quién se remitir cuando la cápsula del tiempo se encuentre vagando en el espacio si la urgencia no se remedia. Las imágenes y sonidos grabados en el ridículo Disco de oro corresponderán a una raza extinta que con rigor depredó a las otras formas de vida del planeta. Hay cosas “que no se pueden contar con palabras”: en sus obras de arte y literarias, la artista se vale de geometrías, diagramas, esquemas y dibujos que conducen a lo indecible. En Otro día (poemas sintéticos) repite esta estrategia a la espera quizá de que las estampas circulares logren conmover al insensato, a aquél que se dirige, y además alardeando, hacia su propia aniquilación. El ácido emborrona la memoria que contienen, nos dice;  acaso advierte que el ácido emula nuestro quehacer. Borramos día con día nuestra memoria, lo que fuimos.

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The World was Flat, Now it’s Round and it will be an Hologram

Del 29 de abril al 28 de agosto  de 2016

 

Curators: Lina López & François Bucher

 

 

Julieta Aranda, Erick Beltrán, François Bucher y Lina López, Leyla Cárdenas, Agnes Denes, Harun Farocki, Fabien Giraud y Raphaël Siboni, Jeppe Hein, Hermann von Helmholtz, Profr. Dr. Bernd Kröplin, Douwe Mulder, John Mario Ortiz, Julien Prévieux, Benoît Pype, Manuela Ribadeneira, Rometti Costales, Tomás Saraceno & Daniel Steegman Mangrané

 

 

The title of this exhibition announces a voyage through time, a seemingly chronological history of major transformations of time and space. This history seems to be linear, but it is so only in appearance. The title names the evidence that time and space mutate as consciousness mutates.

 

The sailors who sailed with Christopher Columbus were afraid of the abyss at the edge of the earth and of the monstrous creatures they expected to find there. Taking our point of departure in this image, we may consider that for at least 1,500 years prior to this voyage, experiments, such as those conducted by Eratosthenes in 200 BC, had successfully proved the roundness of the earth. But nevertheless, to Columbus’ men the world was still flat.

 

Our world today is made up of three dimensions, which places us firmly on a globe. This is the state of mind of our contemporary civilisation, even if higher dimensions are comprehended in mathematics and physics; and even if the collapse of space-time – as we understand it – has found a scientific expression in the field of quantum mechanics.

 

How does an idea take shape over time? How does the emergence of a technology – a means of transport, a means of navigation, a means of recording, for example – durably modify our consciousness and our relationship to space and time?

 

The exhibition presents a group of contemporary artists whose works open perspectives on these fundamental problems. The passage from a flat to a round world, and beyond, is marked by shifts in consciousness. This is the thread of the exhibition – which is laid out like a journey – where instruments of man play a major role.

 

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Open Studio #5 – Zea Mays | Gabriel Rico y Luis Alfonso Villalobos

From March 6th to july 12th, 2015

 

Apendix EA5:

Ignacio Aguirre / Manuel Álvarez Bravo / Fritzia Irizar / Gabriel Kuri / Rubén Mora Gálvez / Gerardo Murillo, Dr. Atl / Kiyoshi Niiyama / Ana Luisa Rébora / Pedro Reyes / Maruch Sántiz Gómez / Francisco Ugarte / Edward Weston

 

 

About the Project

Once known as la villa maicera (‘the maize-growing villa’), Zapopan is one of the municipalities that produces the most maize in all of Mexico. For the artists invited to EA5, Zapopan functions as a catalyst for a project that explores humanity’s relationship with maize.

 

Given the controversies associated with this foodstuff (the global increase in production, the irregular application of biotechnologies, the corporate control of the Mexican countryside), society in general is on high alert. Zea Mays, a project by Gabriel Rico and Luis Alfonso Villalobos, celebrates collective memory as a means of protecting and preserving cultural heritage.

 

Starting from an analysis of twentieth-century maize production,1 the artists have constructed an installation in which statistics are displayed on a hanging made of sheets of compostable bioplastic, produced from maize-derived enzymes. The information is laid out and interpreted on this transparent, resistant material on a scale of millions of tons to centimeters. The graph is accompanied by ten goffered images that configure an iconography of facts related to the economic history of maize.

 

In another part of the exhibition there are two display windows containing a sampling of ears of maize in juxtaposition with recipients of different kinds of corn ethanol, and other derivatives articulating a link between nature and technology.

 

As part of their work in process, Gabriel Rico and Luis Alfonso Villalobos have intervened in the terrace across from the project room to set up a temporary maize plot. The space constitutes a sound installation, where visitors hear a frequency that, according to the research of Rich Marini and Dorothy Retallack, speeds ups the process of mitosis, the generation of protoplasm, and the growth of ethylene in the plants.

 

The stairs leading to the maize plot are labeled with concepts related to foodstuffs and their social repercussions. This glossary will be engraved on paper made from corn stalks. Thus, in a sustainable cycle, the artists cultivate their own support.

 

Zea Mays

The scientific name of the plant we know as maize or Indian corn is Zea mays, from the Greek word zeiá (‘cereal’) and the Taino word mahís. It was Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and traveler, who gave the plant its scientific name. Some sixty different varieties are now known, distinguished by the shape, size, and color of the grains.

 

Maize is thought to have been domesticated originally in Mesoamerica, specifically in central Mexico, some 7,000 years ago. It is likely that the wild grass called teosinte (‘corn of the god,’ in Nahuatl) was the ancestor of our modern maize.

 

Maize is called tlayol or tlayolli in the Nahuatl language. A constant in the history of Mexico, it was the basic staple food of the Mexican people until the middle of the past century. The plant has not only represented sustenance for millions of Mexicans, but has also been a central element in the cosmogonies of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The characteristics and life cycle of the plant have determined their relationship to the earth and their special way of conceiving the passage of time. The traditional milpa system of small landholdings continues to prevail in the Mexican countryside, in contrast to the rigorous methods and rhythms of industrialized agricultural production and free market forces.

 

In New Spain, maize in one form or another was consumed at every meal by the greater part of the population. In 1803, according to Humboldt, Indians, mestizos, mulattos, and castas made up more than half of the total population of Mexico City: around 69,500 inhabitants, as compared to approximately 67,500 creoles and Spaniards. These almost 70,000 mouths depended on maize prepared in different ways –in tortillas, atole, or tamales, toasted or boiled, powdered to make pinole, etc.–, although attempts were made to inculcate a European diet.

 

The endeavor to wean the Indians away from corn continued in independent Mexico. The intellectual discourse of the Porfirian age drew on various theories to explain Mexico’s backwardness and the obstacles to European models of “civility and modernity.” In 1899 Francisco Bulnes attributed the country’s backwardness to a combination of indigenous weakness and Iberian conservatism. He explained the weakness of indigenous Mexicans by dividing humanity into three branches: people of maize, people of wheat, and people of rice. Bulnes arrived at the conclusion that “the race of wheat is the only truly progressive one,” whereas “maize has been the eternal pacifier of the American indigenous races and the foundation of their refusal to become civilized.” There were some, like Manuel Gamio, who denounced Bulnes as a racist, though Gamio himself made efforts from his position at the Instituto Nacional Indigenista to replace maize with soya.

 

Nutritional explanations of economic underdevelopment were preferred by the Mexican elites to the formulations of “social scientists” in Europe and the United States, who pointed to a supposed biological inferiority to explain the unproductive nature of indigenous Mexicans. Those recently emigrated from the countryside tended to find it very difficult to adapt to the demands of industry, accustomed as they were to the individual rhythms of rural life. The elites acknowledged that they were a large and permanent part of the population and sought ways to “redeem” them through intermarriage with people of European descent and so incorporate them into national life. (It was not necessary to be European, just to act, eat, and live like a European.) Vicente Riva Palacio went so far as to suggest that Indians, with their scant facial hair and lack of wisdom teeth, had reached a stage of development superior to that of Europeans. Another solution proposed to the problem of Mexico’s indigenous people was universal education: in the 1880s, Justo Sierra led a campaign to make primary education obligatory for all Mexican children.

 

Decades of revolutionary struggle contributed to the growth of national unity. The revolutionary governments replaced exclusion with inclusive indigenista policies, exalting the Indians as important members of the nation. With patriotic fervor, massive rural education programs were implemented, in the hope of finally integrating the country’s indigenous people as a component of Mexican identity.

 

When researchers finally analyzed the Mexican diet in the 1940s, they discovered that corn and wheat where practically interchangeable, and that rural malnutrition was not a result of the inferiority of the tortilla but rather of poverty and scarcity of land, which made ensuring a balanced diet impossible.

 

Viviana Kuri

 

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Another Day (Synthetic Poems) | Verónica Gerber Bicecci

From November 30th, 2018to March 10th, 2019

 

In 1919 José Juan Tablada published [A Day… (Synthetic Poems)], a paean to nature in the form of a series of haikus and circular prints designed by the poet himself. Artist and writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci has decided to rewrite the poems and imagine a different day, almost a century later, in which the most urgent thing ―more urgent than an ode― is to reflect on the imminence of an ecological catastrophe.Tablada’s drawings are replaced by the photographs sent into space on the Golden Record in 1977 (one of the few proofs of the existence of life on earth that will survive when we have all disappeared). These images have been intervened with acetone, in order to emulate Tablada’s original works and at the same time to blur the memory they contain.

 

 

The passage of a century signifies many things. Four successive generations, a revolution (institutionalized), a second world war, the redrawing of borders and the creation of new nations, the twentieth-century avant-garde, the moon landing, women’s liberation and sexual emancipation (alongside sexual repression and the oppression of women), technology as a way of life, climate change, ecological disaster, militarized borders, migrations held in limbo, the decline of democracy.

 

 

With powerful subtlety, the rewritings and illustrations of Gerber Bicecci place us irremediably in the present moment, a moment at which existence seems to be breaking up, and a catastrophic future renders yet another century of human life unlikely. If the emergency is not addressed, there will be no one to turn to as the time capsule hurdles through space.The images and sounds preserved on the ridiculous Golden Record will belong to an extinct race that rigorously preyed on other forms of life on the planet. There are things “that cannot be told in words”: in her visual art and literary works, the artist makes use of geometries, diagrams, patterns, and drawings that lead to the unsayable.

 

 

In Otro día… (poemas sintéticos) [Another Day… (Synthetic Poems)] she repeats this strategy, hoping perhaps that the circular prints may succeed in affecting those heading toward their own destruction (and boasting about it all the while). The acid ―she tells us― blurs the memory they contain: an acid that works exactly as we do, daily effacing our memories, effacing what we have been.

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Potential Guile | Alejandro Almanza Pereda

From November 30th, 2018 through March 10th, 2019

 

Alejandro Almanza Pereda works in the areas of sculpture, video, and installation that defy common sense and provoke vertigo. His works seem to be the evidence for an error or the persistence of a catastrophe that never happens. He creates a confrontation with the viewer, by forcing the compositional structures of his works to the limit, requiring them to dramatize an inevitable disaster that, paradoxically and inexplicably, suspends its imminence and questions our logic as if it were a spasm in time.

 

Strangeness and surprise: a surreal non-logic forms an appendix to his work. Distortion and mathematical delirium are the artist’s obsession, suggesting other possibilities and, with luck, more flexible and vaster realities.

 

In El que hizo la ley hizo la trampa [The one who made the law made the way to get around it] we are manipulated to become unwilling witnesses to the moment in which an overloaded structure, inexplicably sustained by just a rod, is to succumb beneath its own weight, causing irreversible damage. Or perhaps not.

 

In another vein, Veintiuno exquisito [Exquisite Twenty-One] invites the spectators into a seductive free throw game that turns to frustration as we discover, through factors beyond our skill, the impossibility of its execution.

 

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Open Studio #2 – Regrese Mañana (Come Back Tomorrow) | N. Samara Guzmán Fernández

From October 6 to February 9, 2014

 

The installation Regrese Mañana (Come Back Tomorrow) reflects on bureaucratic processes from a Kafkaesque perspective, in which the arrangement of scales is only apparently nonsensical, for it contributes to the motivation to multiply procedures and so obtain a piece with commercial value.

 

The work of Guzmán Fernández reproduces, underlines, and extols the absurdity of bureaucratic processes and procedures and of institutional rules. The artist is obsessed by bureaucracy as an entity that records and regulates our existence, a great power behind the desk or counter that decides and organizes our timetables, in accordance with dark, hermetic, inflexible, and mysterious rules. Often imbued with caustic humor, her work reflects on these processes and, far from condemning them, discovers a motivation and a raison d’être in their very monotony and their tendency to consume time, energy, and resources.

 

In Regrese Mañana, the artist presents the different elements that make up the bureaucratic process, offering the visitor a pre-established path to conclude his or her procedure and to access the hidden node of the exhibition and its appendix. There are always shortcuts and alternative routes, however, that can modify the process formulated in the first instance.

 

Appendix Open #2:

Meriç Algün · Allen Bukoff · Miguel Calderón · Edgar Cobián ·Minerva Cuevas · Jose Davila · Dr. Lakra · Gonzalo Lebrija · Sarah Lucas · Rubén Méndez · Roman Ondák · Adrian Procel · Luis Miguel Suro · Ignacio Uriarte · Danh Vo

 

 

Samara Guzmán Fernández
Born in Mexico City, 1988. Lives and works in Guadalajara. A graduate of the visual arts program of the Universidad de Guadalajara, Guzmán Fernández has also studied communications, cinema, and photography. She is currently a recipient of the “Young Creators” grant of the FONCA (2012-2013) for the project Fanart. Since 2011 she has been co-director of the independent exhibition space TRAMA Centro. In 2012 she received a PECDA grant for cultural promotion.

 

In 2011 she published Caja Registradora (Taller de Ediciones Económicas). She has held two individual exhibitions: Correo gratis por un día (La Galería de Comercio, Mexico City) and Ex-estudiante (Sala Juárez of the Laboratorio de Artes Variedades, Guadalajara). Collective exhibitions in which she has participated include: Personas and José Guadalupe Carrillo García (Sala Juárez, Guadalajara), Tinnitus y Fosfenos (Museo de Arte de Zapopan), Casa de Cultura (Biblioteca del Estado, Jalisco), and Creación en Movimiento (Jardín Borda, Cuernavaca, Morelos). She received the “Estimulos a las Creación Artística” grant from the state of Jalisco for 2009-2010 to participate in the collective project José Guadalupe Carrillo García, which culminated in an exhibition and publication.

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Travelling around the world

Katharina Fritsch, Else (Twin Gabriel), Isa Genzken, Katharina Hinsberg, Candida Höfer, Martin Honert, Olaf Metzel, Karin Sander, Rosemarie Trockel, Jorinde Voigt & Corinne Wasmuht

From August 13, 2016 through February 12, 2017

 

MAZ & Instituto Cultural Cabañas present an overview of sixty years of German art from the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) collection in Stuttgart. The exhibition at this venue focuses on the contemporary situation, with works from the 1980s until the present day. The return of non-naïve, post-conceptual figuration and the increasing number of women artists who play an influential role are characteristics of the German art scene today. Installation and sculptural approaches remain part of the pluralistic pattern of contemporary practice. This generation has distanced itself from the heroic burden of the grand masters of postwar German art in an intellectual yet at the same time humorous way.

 

Rosemarie Trockel and Katharina Fritsch mix conceptual, almost minimalist traditions with seemingly banal everyday objects. Trockel turns patterned tablecloths into enormous abstract paintings and hotplates into conceptual videos. Fritsch analyzes the tension between the auratic object and the commodity on the shelf. Olaf Metzel’s works always strike a fine balance between the seemingly arbitrary and the carefully composed. He reproduces pages torn from books on thin metal plates. By not being thrown away, but rather enlarged to supersized dimensions on the wall, these pieces of literature ask us just how connected we are to our cultural traditions.

 

Wasmuht juxtaposes masterly oil painting technique with digital internet visuality: this giant oil painting registers the superfast images that come and go in microseconds on the screen. Else Gabriel is a performance artist. In her video she is disguised as a prehistoric Neanderthal sitting on an old truck tire and being dragged across the African sands. In a similarly humorous vein, her small-scale installation Bye bye performs the ritual of constantly saying goodbye with endless patience.

 

Martin Honert’s The Flying Classroom draws on a popular children’s book of the same title. The installation functions as a sort of theater backdrop: the illusion fades away as you approach more closely. It is a metaphor of how memory functions: fleeting and ephemeral if you try to pin it down. Isa Genzken combines sculpture with architectural models. The heavy concrete seems to hover atop the thin skeletal pedestal, its rough texture looking new and old at the same time, evocative of ruins. Karin Sander polished an egg, turning an ordinary, everyday object into something very precious. This work reflects the institutional conditions of exhibiting art.

 

Jorinde Voigt presents an intellectual chart that combines fragments of historical philosophy and geometric calculations, touched with an ironic gilding. Katharina Hinsberg conceptualizes the artistic practice of drawing a line, performing the act on sheet after sheet of paper until the block becomes a sculpture in itself. Candida Höfer examines what human beings do in semipublic spaces like lobbies and assembly halls. Paradoxically, the atmospheric density of her photographs stems from the complete absence of people in them.

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Man with Ax and Other Brief Situations | Liliana Porter

From 28 November 2014 to 1 March 2015

 

El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones breves (Man with Ax and Other Brief Situations) constitutes an innovation in the conception of Liliana Porter’s work. Originally conceived for the MALBA, this site-specific installation is adapted here to one of the MAZ’s galleries. The artist uses the hall as the compositional space of the work itself: a movie-set or variety show atmosphere (such as those Porter has worked with since the 1970s), where various actions provoke “brief situations” acted out by fantastical figures.

 

Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, Liliana Porter has lived and worked in New York City since 1964. Her work has been exhibited around the world and acquired by various public and private collections. Porter has occupied a key place in Latin American art since the beginnings of conceptual art.

 

In an unmistakable style, Porter uses a wide ranges of media –sculpture, engraving, works on canvas, photography, video, and installation– to portray extraordinary situations of everyday life in an interplay of the absurd and the philosophical.

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ATOPIA. MIGRATION, HERITAGE AND PLACELESSNESS

Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Vienna 

Allora & Calzadilla / Jonathas de Andrade / Taysir Batniji / John Bock / Monica Bonvicini / Abraham Cruzvillegas / Mario García Torres / Carl Michael von Hausswolff y Thomas Nordanstad / Mathilde ter Heijne / Sanja Ikevović / Brad Kahlhamer / Los Carpinteros / Paulo Nazareth / Rivane Neuenschwander / Walid Raad, The Atlas Group / Alex Rodríguez / Do Ho Suh / Allan Sekula

From May 14th to October 5th, 2014

A new exhibition, developed in collaboration with MAZ, Guadalajara with a selection of artworks from TBA21’s collection of contemporary art, traces a growing interest in place-specific narratives, dealing symbolically with the gaps and slippages between topos and atopos, space and non-space, the global and the specific practices of cultural in-betweens and hybridization. TBA21 is an institution of contemporary art, based in Vienna Austria and founded in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg, dedicated to the production, commissioning and dissemination of contemporary art from around the world. A selection of the collection, with a strong focus on artists from Latin America, is presented for the first time in the Americas. Atopia, a word mainly used in medicine and philosophy, literally means placelessness, out of place, unclassifiable and of high originality.

 

It is, in its traditional use, at the same time, a category of otherness, difference, expulsion and exclusion, as it is a reference to the ineffable, the pristine, and the absolute. It is in this double connotation, in which the term becomes a productive figure for thinking in addressing the various ways in which artists have dealt with ideas of place, geography, migration, heritage, translation, the crossing of national, social and cultural borders. The atopic is here but not here, it is a position which denies location, perhaps an attitude that relates to an “original” cultural or social experience but at the same time diffuses it or remains at distance. Thus the exhibition focuses on the practices and representations of the ways in which artists have accessed, rehearsed, participated in and negotiated concepts of “place” or “place of origin,” their past, heritage, and cultural ambiguities, with all the dilemmas such notions provoke. Origin / locality is not a neutral point of reference. What seems to be just a geographic denotation, comes with an apparatus of definitions and is grounded in systems of authority.

 

Geography and place- bound symbolisms incorporate a (very rigid) signifying system through which individuals and collectives register and express their identities. As “writing about the earth,” the science of geography has traditionally bridged human and physical science to map out places of presence and embodiment. Gradually the geographic denotation of space has shifted in favor of a more fluid and multi-layered meaning, invested with personal and intimate affects and complicated by subjectivities and their interaction. Place-specific and locational narratives have thus become important figures of the artistic expressions of the past decade, but also projective sites of stereotyping and (post-colonial or ethnicizing) simplifications. Artistic exploration of geographies through mappings, landscapes, descriptions of sites, places, collection of cultural objects, historical inscriptions and personal research, as well as the shifting political implications in language, writing and formal representation are at the nexus of the current exploration.

 

The exhibition looks at the countersides of the processes of aggregation and homogenization and addresses the ways in which a collection of 21st century art is constructed around the various experiences of difference, in which individuals and collectives participate in different cultural processes and realities. It therefore pivots around the specific systems and methods of exchange, translation, and its embedded critiques. A wide ranging production of visual and spatial works catalyze the reexamination of the agency of the artist in the production of such locational inquiries. It also implies strategies for re-claiming certain histories and place-specificities by way of reasserting territorial representations. The way “localism” is understood in this particular context is not as a reaffirmation of common simplifications but is instead based on productive inquiries and internalization of paradoxes and transitions, which evade categorizations or nostalgic impulses. It also shows how shifting political and economic realities have created new tales of places, and how their histories have sparked the impulse to document the rapid processes of transformation set into motion by new “continental shifts”.

 

Rivane Neuenschwander’s celebrated installation “I wish your wish” (Eu desejo o seu desejo) plays with the idea of transportability and exchangeability of cultural symbols. The Brazilian wish bands, used as a tradition of travellers to São Salvador’s church, Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Bahia, have become a symbol of youth culture worldwide. In Neuenschwander’s work, wishes are exchanged between museum visitors as the piece travels the world from place to place. The transmission and recodification of cultural and historic iconographies are being negotiated by multiple artists from various backgrounds, such as Brad Kahlhammer, in a revision of American Indian totems and katsina dolls meets rock music and Bowery culture, and by Jonathas de Andrade, Do Ho Suh and Abraham Cruzvillegas. De Andrade’s O Levante / The Uprising documents the first horse-drawn cart race in the Brazilian city of Recife, which he organized and masterminded. As a protest against the sanitization of his home town and as a reference to the new forms of urbanization which one encounters throughout the Americas today, the subversive cavalcade is memorializing those existences (namely the carts and their drivers) that have had a long historic function in the city’s transport system are to day considered forbidden ghosts.

 

Alexander Rodriguez takes up the story of an educational facility in the city of Cali, Columbia with his project “Las Americas”, a project which failed its ambitions and was implicated in financial crisis. A similar story of – this time military – disruption is narrated very graphically in the work of Taysir Batniji. The images of destroyed residencies in Palestine are deliberately presented in the form of ordinary real-estate advertisements: each snapshot with a mundane and insignificant comment describing the house (surface, number of rooms, number of possible residents, etc.) Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s Staircase-V is a scale replica of the staircase leading to the artist’s first apartment when moving to New York. Rendered in diaphanous red polyester, the staircase becomes a liminal memory space, between here and there. Similarly, Frio Estudio del Desastre by Los Carpinteros renders a frozen space, the memory of a moment, immobilized in a violent action. Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad Golden Days (Remedios, Colombia, 2012) is a new filmic work by the duo, commissioned by TBA21, which focuses on the area around Remedios, a town in the Antioquia department of Colombia, where gold mining has been the prevalent industry and the main source of income for centuries. In this work the spatial exploration activates a conceptual and physical form of stratification in an alchemistic term “as above, so below.”

 

The film is, at the same time, also an ancestral search for a distant relative who has come to Colombia for mining. Processes of sedimentation are at work in Petrified Petrol Pump by Allora & Calzadilla in which an abandoned gasoline pump appears to have turned into stone. Made from fossil-filled limestone, the indexes of ancient life forms that are visible throughout the sculptural body attest to the organic plentitude of the earth’s pre-history, the very life forms whose long process of anaerobic decomposition provides the material used today to generate energy. Allan Sekula’s seminal work Fish Story thematizes the history and tradition of maritime space as the imaginary and actual geography of advanced capitalism. A key narrative is the connection between containerized cargo movement and the internationalization of the world industrial economy. During his research, the artist traced and questioned a number of contemporary and historic transportation and shipment routes (for example, the Middle Passage of slave trade).

 

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Witness of the Century

Eduardo Abaroa · Doug Aitken · Allora y Calzadilla · Javier Barrios · François Bucher · Agnieszka Casas · Minerva Cuevas · Jose Dávila· Peter Fischli y David Weiss · Sylvie Fleury · Mario García Torres · Thomas Hirschhorn · Yoshua Okón · Gabriel Orozco · Fernando Ortega · Christodoulos Panayiotou · Philippe Parreno · Ana Quiroz · Daniela Rosell · Eduardo Sarabia · Gabriel Sierra · Superflex

 

From November 28th to April 26th, 2015

 

 

Testigo del siglo proposes a reflection on environmental issues and our ecological emergency through an analysis of contemporary human habits. Accumulation, compulsion, abuse, overconsumption, waste, obsolescence, and the loss of subjectivity in the face of uniformity of thought are some of the issues that Testigo del siglo seeks to address and explore, as symptoms of the human pathologies of our time.

 

The group of works that make up Testigo del siglo is centered on the interpretation of certain gestures of contemporary society. The exhibition takes its name from Witness of the Century, by artist François Bucher: a caged parrot ends up repeating the words reproduced incessantly by a tape recorder: “Guantánamo, Guantanamera, Guantanamero.” The parrot is the witness that simply repeats what it hears. Unable to offer its own testimony, it symbolizes the animal world subjugated by humanity, but also human beings in thrall within themselves to the dysfunctional lifestyles they have chosen. Who then are those who actually choose? How much free will is permitted to us within a postindustrial capitalist system in which the Global South has little to say and ecological injustice is rife?1

 

By ecological injustice is meant the extreme vulnerability of the Global South to current and future environmental disasters generated by climate change. Also relevant is the drastically restricted range of consumption options owing to media manipulation, scarcity of information, and lack of economic resources. Nevertheless, Testigo del siglo seeks to affirm the possibility of choice within existing restrictions, in opposition to indifference and apathy, through private dissidence in small actions and decisions that can transform our everyday lives.

 

In The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari writes of ecology not simply in terms of the environment, but as a social and mental ecology that must be developed in common by a society united by new objectives, in opposition to fatalistic passivity and soothing discourses. A society made up of individuals of different subjective natures and creative autonomy, struggling against infantile consensus and uniformity of opinion, which cultivates dissidence and the production of unique existences.2

 

Bucher refers in his work to the Guantánamo detention camp and the reality of the illegal combatant, “whose situation is like that of a Jew in a concentration camp. It is an outside (the camp) that is within the law, but where the law, which claims its own exceptionality, has that person at its mercy, like an animal, not a citizen with rights.”3

 

The situation for the greater part of the population of the Global South is that of another kind of citizen without rights in the face of decisions about the future of humanity in terms of ecological sustainability. The world powers still refuse to significantly diminish their greenhouse gas emissions, with obvious repercussions for the entire globe. Citizens without basic food rights are at the mercy of corporations that introduce genetic modifications and hydrogenation into their products in order to reduce costs and make them economically viable, denying people’s right to clear information about their origin and at the same time withholding information about possible health risks and consequences.

 

It was in the 1960s and ’70s that art began to manifest a concernfor the environment. Artists such as Joseph Beuys and Hans Haacke called on spectators to take responsibility for their own choices and the repercussions they may have on society and the environment. Until the 1980s, most projects tended to develop what might be called “restorationist eco-aesthetics”: art that seeks to repair damaged habitats or reactivate degraded ecosystems.4 At the same time, those working in the area of land art not only used nature as a support but also sought to raise environmental awareness, opening the door to various interpretations of art on the basis of ecology.

 

Various artists and artists’ collectives are currently working on projects that seek to exert a transversal influence, taking into account technological, political, social, and environmental factors. Although Testigo del siglo includes the participation of artists involved in this way, such as Superflex, Allora & Calzadilla, and also Minerva Cuevas, from an activist standpoint, a large part of the work is directed, through the curatorial discourse, at the individual spectator, who in his or her habits or lifestyle is an accomplice to waste, overconsumption, and apathy in the face of the degradation of the habitat and the progressing extinction of its flora and fauna. This includes the common citizen, whose habits daily affect the current and future life of the collectivity. We have also included work that turns its attention to the apparently insignificant, to those moments that are free of this homogeneous and frantic immersion: fixing the gaze on an insect, as Fernando Ortega proposes, or watching a couple riding a bike along a road. And simply listening: no more than that.

 

Working exclusively with local collections, we have sought to reduce our carbon footprint by limiting transport needs. We are aware that the production of the works depends on industrial technologies, but we believe this very fact buttresses the thesis of the showing: we are all ensnared in global capitalism and our way of life is the cause of the present state of things.

 

The issue of other resources, such as electricity for the operation of the lighting and air conditioning equipment, remains a problem to be solved. The ideal solution one day would be for the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, as well as other public institutions, to generate its own energy, and to incorporate alternative forms of functioning into its operations.

 

Viviana Kuri

 

 

 

1 The Global South generally refers to Latin America, Africa, and the greater part of Asia.

2 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

3 Email communication with François Bucher (27 September 2014).

4 T. J. Demos, The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology (2009).

 

The notion of “ecological disaster” is understood as a catastrophic, uncontrollable, and apparently uncontainable stain caused by human beings on the environment, as an ontological condition of the human species, which appears as a paradox that cannot be overcome. Placed in the twentieth century during which the muscle of capitalism and consumer society strengthened to its fullest. The first decades of the twenty-first century may be understood as an extension of the paradigm of power and consumption of the past century. From this particular narrative strategy our position lays on the theory by Félix Guattari in his book The Three Ecologies, (1989) which attests that ecological imbalance involves not only environmental factors, but equally important are the ecology of social relations and the ecology of human subjectivities.

 

It is common to encounter “environmentally-friendly” discourses as part of marketing strategies, as if the ecology of the environment was the only cause of the present systemic disaster . This exhibition poses questions related to the other two areas of Guattari’s three ecologies. What kind of relationship do we establish with the objects that surround us? Why is the self-regulation of resources impossible within contemporary social structures?

 

The works chosen for this exhibition deal with various characteristics of contemporary society: unemployment, marginalization, racism, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, and neurosis. They reflect the tensions interwoven in this complex tangle of features and speak to the hubris with which our society overpowers, the irrationality of the accumulation, the sacralization of profit, and the corporatist policies with commercial ends, by which the dynamics of our society are circumscribed, a symbolic universe that reduces every subject to the role of consumer and confines every object to the category of merchandise.

 

Three pieces constitute the spinal column of the exhibition: “Critical Laboratory” has been conceived by Thomas Hirschhorn as a space both mental and physical, secret, peripheral, in which the question may be posed: How can I achieve a critical position? Through images taken from the world of fashion, luxury products, economics, philosophy, culture, war, suburbia, and history, this space could well be a laboratory for biological weapons, pharmaceutical products, or synthetic drugs. The spectators are directly addressed: the texts on the Stockholm syndrome, the plastic chairs and flowers, the tape and lights seek to provoke a “crisis” in their viewpoints and opinions.

 

In “Witness of the Century,” the piece that gives its name to the exhibition as a whole, François Bucher creates a domestic habitat for a parrot that interacts with a sound teaching it to say three words: “Guantánamo, Guantanamera, Guantanamero.” The reference to Cuban independence is overridden by the type of cognitive exchange in play: a caged animal figure being trained to speak a language it does not understand.

 

Finally, Doug Aitken’s video piece “Migration” is a juxtaposition of a postindustrial landscape (a decadent incarnation of suburban and rural areas in industrialized countries) and wild animals interacting with an unknown medium. In an affected cinematic style, a camera captures a bleak succession of interactions with objects and situations in which the witness, behind the camera, remains suspended in a moment of intimacy.

 

As part of the criteria that governs this project was to draw on works chosen exclusively from local collections, in order to activate a different ecology: that of collecting itself. There are some important private collections in Guadalajara, which circulate poorly in local institutions. This decision was in line with our own curatorial discourse and our intention to shake up the cycle of production, consumption, storage, and exhibition of works fostered by globalization in the contemporary art market. Likewise, the project seeks to reduce its carbon footprint through diminished air transport, in keeping with the proposals of the Reduce Art Flights campaign, initiated in 2007 by the British artist Gustav Metzger.1

 

A robust program of parallel activities specially prepared to encourage participation, awareness, and dialogue with the community, creates a network of interconnections that, from different platforms, generates resonances and helps to strengthen the social tissue. The speed with which the coming ecological disaster is approaching demonstrates that individual efforts are no longer enough. A solution can only be arrived at collectively, through a change to an ethical paradigm that will save us from extinction.

 

Humberto Moro

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Fabiola | Francis Alÿs

Fabiola or the silent multiplication

 

From November 13th to March 9th, 2014

 

My first encounter with Fabiola occurred in Brussels on September 1992. I was wandering around flea markets looking for ‘hand painted’ copies of ‘masterworks’. The low market value of copies would allow me to possess a collection of ‘originals’ of famous paintings. I expected to have some day my walls covered with unique versions of the Giocondas, The Last Supper, or whatever I could find.

 

Surprisingly, in the same market, a few shops away, there were two identical portraits depicting a feminine profile that, although vaguely familiar, was not identifiable to me. Street vendors were calling her Fabiola.

 

Six months later I had acquired a dozen replicas of the veiled woman from Jean-Jaques Henner, whereas my masterpiece collection was still down to a couple of Angelus and a very laborious version of Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. Eventually, I ended swapping my Picasso for yet another Fabiola.

 

The omnipresence of this obscure painting was somewhat enigmatic. I was wondering why, out of all available models, the amateur was insisting in copying a painting by a secret master of the 19th century. The seductive simplicity and its consequent ease of reproduction weren’t enough to explain its potential of multiplication. I perceived a mutual ignorance: whereas professional painters plagiarized Marcel Duchamp, Sunday painters paraphrased Jean-Jaques Henner. Fabiola indicated a different criterion of what a masterwork could be.

 

Francis Alÿs

Mexico City, September 1994.

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Health as Metaphor

Curator: Alan Sierra

 

Ramiro Ávila, Ismaïl Bahri, José Bedia, Santiago Borja, Pedro Caetano, Isa Carrillo, Sebastian Gräfe,Diego Gutiérrez, Ariel Guzik,  N. Samara Guzmán Fernández, Jerónimo Hagerman, Anna Halprin, Pierre Huyghe, Alexa Karolinski / Ingo Niermann, Andrea Mármol, Shana Moulton, Tania Pérez Córdova, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Jennifer Teets / Lorenzo Cirrincione & Franz Erhard Walther

 

From September 1, 2017, to February 11, 2018

 

 

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” This has been the definition of health of the World Health Organization since 1948. Although the concept has lost none of its validity, its application is by no means generalized.

 

In spite of the great progress achieved by the health sciences, the way these sciences are instrumented in developed nations often ends in an impasse: a patient may fail to understand his or her condition owing to a stated incapacity for self-recovery, stopgap measures may be taken to treat the conditions, and –in a worst case scenario– the patient may fail to gain complete knowledge of a cure.

 

The medical mind observes a body, interprets its signs, and comes up with a verifiable diagnosis. But what about the patient who has been examined? To what extent does subjective bodily experience play a role in the success of a treatment?

 

In everyday health care there are certain beliefs, remedies, and treatments for the body whose effects are not necessary provable, but they do offer consolation. Traditional medicine, experimental therapies, and even sympathetic magic have an enormous potential in narrowing the gap between clinical practice and our universal capacity to feel relief.

 

Health as Metaphor is an exhibition that seeks to explore certain artistic practices dealing with the care and understanding of the human body and with the treatment of real or imaginary ills, from a perspective different from that of allopathic medicine.

 

Although the exhibition takes a critical stance regarding the domination of evidence-based medicine and the weakening of personal agency in health care, both private and public, it also presents a series of works that seek to contribute to the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of the visitor.

 

Alan Sierra

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Nausea | Works from Ashida Cueto Collection

Curator: Mónica Ashida

 

Marco Arce, Miguel Ángel Estévez Nieves, Chris Hammerlein, Helio Montiel, José Luis Sánchez Rull, Joaquín Segura / Mauricio Limón & Germán Venegas

From March 7 through July 2, 2017

 

The Ashida Cueto Collection was born of the free and acutely intelligent vision of Carlos Ashida, a perspective shared during a life of passion for and commitment to art.

 

Countless individual stories are intertwined with that of the collection, which was responsible for discovering and giving a home to many talents on the Mexican cultural scene. The review of the collection is an ongoing effort, with enormous creative and interpretative possibilities.

 

The story involves, to be sure, the many reasons, circumstances, and special moments in which the different works were acquired, but also the symbolic power exerted by the content of the works themselves, which can be reread in the present context, and of course their collective importance in understanding the history of contemporary art in Mexico through the 1980s and 1990s.

 

In this context, Nausea is but a small sampling from the collection, whose narrative seeks to offer a glimpse of the often anguished and desperate lives we live, where perversity takes its place between cynicism and hypocrisy. In this sense, things do not seem to have changed much in the twenty years that separate us from the time when some of these works were created.

 

Although Sartre’s novel, which gives its name to the exhibition, was written more than seventy years ago, it would seem that the concerns and preoccupations of human beings have remained very much the same.

 

As then, we live in an age of anxiety, in which a latent violence in the air has led us to a renewed awareness of the importance of union. Nevertheless, the speed of communications and the sway of outrageous opinions proffered by the ubiquitous media, within reach of all, have led us to question the scope and profundity of these very concerns.

 

We are threatened today by the banality of evil, in the form of a leader who pokes his red nose into social networks and seeks to govern the world from his Twitter account. The attack from abroad has piqued our pride and made us swell our chests, declaring ourselves unconditional defenders of our Mexicanness. But are we really willing to take an impartial and scrupulous look at our inner selves?

 

The existential void of a life full of customs and habits that seem to have lost all meaning, in which being a part of society requires one to abide by unquestioned rules and standards of behavior that ensure the stability of this great organism, continues to distress certain individuals who, owing perhaps to a keener sensibility, feel that they live in an alien world. This awareness of reality is rather a nightmare than a privilege, leading as it does to alienation from everything and everyone. It reaches the point where, like Antoine Roquentin in Sartre’s novel, ones experiences a sense of repulsion, a nausea at the very idea of life.

 

Given this premise, it is not by chance that the centerpiece of the exhibition is a work by Germán Venegas, Aquelarre (Coven), a high relief executed in 1990 that depicts figures halfway between life and death emerging in an almost natural way from the forms of a tree trunk that has confined them during their long existence. This vision shows us “life in its most lugubrious colors,” but also provokes reflection, as do all the artists in the exhibition, on the value of the observation of this world and of its inhabitants in their most vulnerable forms, in their weaknesses, fears, and darkest desires, in short, in the experiences that make them imperfectly human: a place which, in spite of it all, we insist on glimpsing a ray of hope.

 

Thus, just as Roquentin meticulously preserved his words in an attempt to magnify the things around him, the artists gathered in Nausea go beyond the ethical prejudices imposed on images to create a sort of diary in which obscenity, violence, death, eroticism, and fear combine amidst the visceral and the rational in a quest to prevent the mere habit of living from putting an end to one’s own life.

 

Mónica Ashida

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Without Intention, Purpose, or End | Antonio Ballester Moreno

From December 1, 2017, through April 11, 2018

 

One of the recurring themes in the work of Antonio Ballester Moreno is the notion of innate creativity: the virtue of creative intelligence that we eventually lose, as we grow older, in the face of standardized conventions.

 

Ballester Moreno is interested in analyzing the mechanisms by which we relate to our natural and social environments. Artisanal work –working with one’s hands– is inevitably linked to an individual context: as something generally synthetic, it is intimately connected with the person who performs it. It is a useful creative task that brings together the ways of feeling of a community.

 

For Sin intención, propósito o finalidad (Without Intention, Purpose, or End), Antonio Ballester Moreno visited various artisans’ workshops in Guadalajara and gathered a selection of utilitarian ceramic work: in Tlaquepaque, Cerámica Suro, the pottery workshop of the Lucano brothers and the flowerpot and planter workshop of the Ramírez family; in Tonalá, the pottery workshop of the Farías brothers and the jar and pitcher workshop in the Colonia El Rosario; and finally, in Zapopan, the pottery stalls across from the Mercado del Mar.

 

For months preceding the opening of the exhibition, an open invitation was extended to help to decorate this traditional pottery and ceramic work in the workshops of the MAZ. Many different groups participated: in additions to art students and the personnel of the museum itself, there were civil associations such as FM4, a mutual support group of the ISSSTE for patients with breast cancer, groups of primary school students, and various neighbors and merchants of the zone. With creative freedom, using the materials at their disposal, the participants helped to create the works on display here.

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